The failed economics of our software commons and what to do about it

http://pchiusano.github.io/2014-12-08/failed-software-economics

by jerf • 12 years ago

176 119 12 years ago

pchiusano.github.io

javajosh• 12 years ago

tldr: matching pledges to fund FOSS at https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/intro. "Snowdrift" is a reference to a game theoretic game similar to the prisoner's dilemma.

My take: solid idea, terrible name and URL, and also it won't succeed unless some big, respected FOSS names endorse it.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

Note: .coop is not a new fancy TLD, it's a sponsored TLD only for actual cooperative organizations, and been around more than a decade.

dllthomas9• 12 years ago

What don't you like about the name?

I think it 1) invokes "things piling up", 2) references relevant game theory in two ways, and 3) draws attention to the fact we're organized as a cooperative. All of which seem a good fit for what we're doing.

davidw• 12 years ago

Ideas like this have been around for a while, but never seemed to take off. Maybe in the era of kickstarter and similar things, it's more likely to succeed.

It's likely to work better for existing projects that need extra work, though, because it's not going to be easy to get people involved in something that doesn't even exist as a proof of concept.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

Indeed, Snowdrift.coop says it's really for existing projects, not for new initiatives. It's not for Kickstarting.

PaulHoule• 12 years ago

The quadratic growth dynamic for individuals looks dangerous to me. Change the x to x^2 in the exponential growth equation and you get a singularity.

jerf2• 12 years ago

I don't think it's quadratic for individuals. Individuals give (base + incr * other_pledgers)... the total donated grows "quadratically", but for the pledgers it's just linear growth based on the number of other donators. Since pledges are bounded per-user, it's subquadratic as the project starts hitting the pledge limits of their users. (Which makes sense since of course all the accounts have to balance and users aren't going to be willing to write blank checks.)

Mikhail_Edoshin• 12 years ago

Yes, they say that the amount grows "up to the amount you have in your Snowdrift.coop account which you of course control".

phillmv• 12 years ago

I had this idea earlier this year and investigating how to seriously pursue it was in my 2015 todo list. Great to see other people moving on this.

vrnut• 12 years ago

It seems to require technical talent having a conversation with project managers for their company to pay other people to be open source developers.

I think in most cases technical talent that would care about these underlying issues would rather try to become open source developers themselves.

derf_• 12 years ago

Then why wouldn't they have a conversation with project managers for their company to pay them to be open source developers, instead of other people?

Totient• 12 years ago

Looks like a system to setup up assurance contracts for funding software. Glad to see more people trying to make this sort of thing work.

What's interesting is that you can actually make pledging a dominant strategy, if you find someone willing to put up enough capital. Roughly speaking, dominant assurance contracts work along the lines of "Everyone who pledges will receive X amount of money if the fundraising fails to hit the appropriate threshold." For anyone who would stand to gain from public good, the outcomes are now "Pledge: either the project will be funded or I will get money vs Don't Pledge: either the project will be funded or I will get no money"

http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf

walterbell5• 12 years ago

Any examples of this model being applied in the real world?

dllthomas9• 12 years ago

That's not quite right - it's "Pledge: either the project is funded and I spend money, or I get money", vs the "Don't Pledge" you give.

It's still interesting, to be sure.

ssivark• 12 years ago

I think it would be great for both Snowdrift and Wikipedia if Wikipedia endorses Snowdrift and attempts using the platform to raise funds.

angersock• 12 years ago

So, some things that stand in the way of OSS:

In some companies, using OSS or even commercial tools that solve problems is frowned on if it seems like a better idea to roll a tool in-house. NIH is huge in many sectors (fighting against this myself at work), and a lot of the same folks who are reluctant to let other people's code into their work are also reluctant to give back to the community from which it came.

In certain places, using OSS is a colossal pain in the neck. Certain enterprise problems are completely unaddressed in various ecosystems, and when they are addressed (say, Ruby's support of Kerberos and LDAP) they are usually just addressing the one or two pain points that that dev had at the time. People are usually not willing to properly solve a problem given limited time and resources.

Even if they are willing to exert effort, many ecosystems can be completely unhelpful and unwilling to give people with domain expertise the support they need to make meaningful contributions. As an example of this, working on a small math library for the new language Elixir, I had at least one person (in an otherwise amazing and friendly IRC channel) continually asking "Wait, why are you doing any type of numerical stuff in Elixir?". Now, imagine that kind of reaction to enterprise features (much harder to get right!) in a different language, and you start to see why things are the way they are.

I don't know if there are any ways of fixing this other than just doing it for the sheer joy of helping other programmers and knowing that, someday somewhere in some ledger, your effort will be rewarded--or at least marked as legacy some other sod has to work around. :)

zanny• 12 years ago

People are usually not willing to properly solve a problem given limited time and resources.

They are solving their own problems. It is bad enough when people are shoveling snow for everyone else for free, to think they would do it while their car is not stuck would be ludicrous.

In that context, the only incentive that works is compensation for ones labors. If they want Rubys support of authentication protocols to improve, they have to do it themselves, or pledge some money and hope enough companies do it to pay for it to be done.

imagine that kind of reaction to enterprise features

At least in the context of numericals, I think it is more "dont make a new snowdrift where there isn't one already, and we have already mostly gotten rid of a similar one in the numpy ecosystem". When free software developer resources are already incredibly scarce, them being wasted on project duplication sucks. Albeit, implementing features for certain programming languages is one of the least bad duplicated efforts.

someday somewhere in some ledger, your effort will be rewarded

The whole point of the article is that being listed in the contributors file is not enough for 99% of developers and the 1% that do volunteer like that are being (voluntarily) exploited for their labor as a result, and software a a whole cannot sustain like that.

fidotron• 12 years ago

The bigger problem is open source software as a business model incentivises making the software over complicated, as if it just worked properly there would be no need for value added services. This is what lies at the core of the Docker/Rocket fiasco. (And possibly systemd too).

This means that good open source projects almost by definition rely on being produced in someone's free time, or as a side effect of something else (such as Rails), because any company funding something they don't directly use will have some extraction motive which will eventually lead the project into a quagmire.

walterbell5• 12 years ago

This is also a problem with commercial software and maintenance contracts, not to mention "certified engineers" in the adjacent ecosystem.

dllthomas9• 12 years ago

Very much the case - look at Oracle or Cisco.

dllthomas9• 12 years ago

That's true of current open-source business models, but is a part of what Snowdrift.coop hopes to assuage. It's money for improving the product, from a community who wants to see the product improved.

Ono-Sendai• 12 years ago

An alternative: pay for open source software development out of tax revenues.

Sanddancer2• 12 years ago

That becomes a very sticky situation very quickly. What sort of entity would qualify for such money? Would Microsoft qualify for some money for their various open source projects, like F#, or the newly opened .net projects? Would Oracle qualify for MySQL and BerkeleyDB, when they offer a closed-source version for those that can't abide by the open source copyrights?

A better solution for me would be to make the process of becoming a 501(c)3 much easier, so parties can donate easier, and tax-free. I've spoken to a few people who have gone through the process, and it is rather a pain in the butt to get all the requisite paperwork in place, especially if you're just starting out. Making that part easier would in effect do the same thing as fund with tax revenues, while working within the unfortunately byzantine tax system.

paulhauggis• 12 years ago

I disagree with this. There are only a handful of OSS projects that are acceptable and I don't trust anyone in government to make a decision on which ones to fund with my tax dollars.

If you need funding for a project, go commercial or have a commercial counterpart. The market will decide which ones get funded and which ones don't.

poulson• 12 years ago

Academic research is funded through taxpayer money, and, as an academic, I can assure you that much of it has a much lower impact than many open source projects.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

Easier to make a website than to change tax law.

bkirwi• 12 years ago

It always seemed to me like the academic-style sabbatical was a nice solution to this. Instead of trying to convince a bunch of people that what you're going to do is going to be worthwhile, you develop a culture where capable people are regularly given time to work on whatever they think is important.

Clojure's a nice example: it's been hugely successful, but I have a hard time imagining anyone raising two years' worth of salary up front to work on their idea for an idiosyncratic Lisp implementation. It looks like he had to fund that work himself; how much more innovation would you see if this kind of extended project was common?

tree_of_item• 12 years ago

Perhaps a basic income would be a more general solution than Snowdrift.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

Absolutely! Implementing a Basic Income takes more political power than starting a webite though.

john_b• 12 years ago

An academic-style sabbatical would not work in the current software development ecosystem because, unlike tenured professors, top software developers cannot be trusted to stay with the same organization after the sabbatical. Universities can get away with this because a tenured professor has already contributed a lot of value to the university (a requirement for getting tenure) and can be trusted to return.

I don't see how this could be adapted short of formally contracting software developers for a period of multiple years and forcing the developer to pay a large amount of money should they break the contract early. I don't imagine many top developers would like the restrictions this imposed.

johngalt• 12 years ago

To paraphrase the problem: 'Lots of people are relying on volunteer created code running for free. How do we fund the development of useful tools and software collectively?'

I'm not sure what the best mechanism is, but making some group pledge on a website probably isn't it. I can't envision that any substantial fraction of people would contribute regardless if other people are helping.

Instead lets restate the problem a little: '$Billions in value is built partially relying on the use of these tools. How do convince the whales that they make money by contributing?'

I wonder if people from the operational side of the house could start this conversation. Business will already do something similar with legacy systems. I.E. Vendor disappears and management finds one of the developers formerly employed at the vendor and cuts them a check for help. When X critical system is at risk everyone gets their checkbook out. We need to connect the operational risk from things like heartbleed with a cost that business people will understand. I like the free software/paid support model, but clearly there could be something better.

dageshi• 12 years ago

The answer I think is "make it simple". Create some central clearinghouse/website the business side of these big companies can give a check too, in return they get an account, the techies/programmers from the company use said account to fill in what technologies/projects they're using, the cash gets distributed between said projects, the clearing house handles all that.

I don't think it would take more than a little prodding to make a company like Google contribute to something like that, so long as it's easy.

neilellis• 12 years ago

Spot on. It’s the same as the Apple/iTunes micropayment model. I buy lots of little things from Apple because I don’t have to go through payment process each time.

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

I don't really think that Google's problem is the inconvenience of having to cut a bunch of checks to the people they want to support, as if they were desperately short of people with administrative skills.

rayiner• 12 years ago

The basic difficulty inherent in monetizing digital goods is affecting all reaches of the software industry, in a bad way. From websites being forced to rely on advertising to system software developers being forced to rely on donations or patronage--the digital goods economy is here, and frankly it's pretty disappointing.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but the first step I think is to admit that you've got a problem. Supply chains in the physical goods world aren't a piece of cake by any means, but at least they are predictable. If you make an SSD, you buy flash from Micron and a controller form Marvell, etc. You just buy it. That simple "money for product" transaction allows the incentives to line up. If it was possible to make money selling SSL libraries the same way it's possible to make money selling flash controllers, the world might be a better place.

ploxiln• 12 years ago

polarssl sold commercial licenses, before they were bought by ARM

virmundi• 12 years ago

Honestly I think the answer is micropayments. Large companies should get together to fund the creation and running of a centralized payment system with no fees. They could move tiny sums of money around to developers. Apps could charge $0.05/month to $1/month to monetize themselves. The user would be given a trial period and then asked to pay.

The way I see it, Google, Amazon, Walmart and others would create a small firm of about 10 people. The central processing system could probably handle real traffic with as little as 20 production servers. All tolled, the company would cost probably 10 mill a year. The benefit is that the founding companies would save in transaction fees their contribution to the new monetary commons. If Amazon didn't lose 3% to credit card purchases, they would save billions a year. At that point what is 10 mill to keep that going? Hell, if I'm off by an order of magnitude, 100 mill a year is still cheaper than the fees.

jerf2• 12 years ago

You might want to take a quick cruise around http://patreon.com . It may shake your confidence in that pronouncement. I'm a patron for far fluffier things right now.

edraferi6• 12 years ago

I really like patreon. It lets me support things I care about in a flexible, accountable way.

ScottBurson• 12 years ago

I built a site for crowdfunding of OSS based on these two observations: (a) businesses have the most money to spend (as you point out), and (b) most money spent on software development goes toward maintenance and continued development of existing systems.

I admit I haven't done as much as I could to promote the site, but the initial reception it got was decidedly unenthusiastic. So I'm afraid I've let it rot, and will probably shut it down soon. If you want to take a look: https://bountyoss.com/

Crowdfunding of OSS still seems to me like a problem that must have a solution. I just don't know what it is.

buovjaga• 12 years ago

Crowdfunding of OSS still seems to me like a problem that must have a solution. I just don't know what it is.

I'd say with 3rd party platforms the solution is marketing. Look at patreon.com that is mentioned in this thread. It grew from Youtube vloggers. These people know how to get attention :)

As a 3rd party FOSS funding platform, you have to provide exceptional quality service and added value. FOSS projects already have their "Donate" pages. You have to convince them and their users that your service is somehow superior. Hence, you need to build a super valuable network of funders through marketing of some kind, be it viral or direct.

zzzeek• 12 years ago

It's tough for companies to fund individual open source developers using "contribution" kinds of models, because now they are essentially paying someone for services in such a way that is entirely outside the bounds of the usual employment agreements, either at-will, full time employment or via a contractor agreement. It opens them up for a variety of legal liabilities.

This is why the bigger projects start up complicated 501c organizations, which from my research appear to be quite burdensome to administer and also place restrictions on the project itself as to what circumstances money can be accepted.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

I think this is a badly needed capability. But the SSL bug (which is highlighted) and the Netflix bug, really brought home an interesting question, "Who is writing your software?"

A company has a whole stable full of developers, but if they are all using the average of 8.9 open source "components" in their stacks, really there is a huge software development "organization" that is essential to their business, larger than their paid employee base, that is both absent from the building and outside of their control.

Think about that. Its bad enough when your middle managers don't know how the sausage is made, what about your engineers? And what are you paying the engineers for anyway? And why are they getting paid essentially to put into action stuff that other people wrote? Its a very interesting question for me to think about.

lotyrin• 12 years ago

Yeah. I hope software management gets less comfortable with these answers and put their money toward real sustainability such that we see the commercial sides of FOSS projects grow in quality and quantity, with sustainable business models around sponsored features, bug bounties, support engagement, etc. and no need to stoop to licensing the software itself for money (neither restrictively free/commercial dual licenses or enterprise/community feature splits).

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

That would be the ideal case, a sort of FOSS non-profit structure. Hard to create the economic alignment however.

carapace• 12 years ago

At this point it would be pretty difficult NOT to rely on enormous stacks of other people's software, from OS's to compiler/interpreter runtimes et. al., library code, frameworks, etc.

However, there is definitely something to be said for the idea of knowing (at least to some useful degree) how the whole thing works if you're going to rely on it.

Right now I think the industry as a whole is beset with far too much new code and "innovation" for its own sake. An obvious counter would be a radical push for simplicity, but I don't see that happening.

wmf• 12 years ago

really there is a huge software development "organization" that is essential to their business

Or even worse, no organization. We're all using a bunch of unmaintained software (e.g. bash) and it never occurred to us to notice that fact.

dllthomas9• 12 years ago

I was under the impression that bash is maintained. The internets suggest currently by Chet Ramey, and it looks like there have been tens of patches this year.

sbov• 12 years ago

How far down the stack are you willing to go? Firmware? Hardware? Hardware components? Processing of natural resources required to create those hardware components? Methods for extracting natural resources? The geological reasons why those natural resources occurred in the first place?

cubix• 12 years ago

why are they getting paid essentially to put into action stuff that other people wrote

Isn't that true of almost every tool in a modern economy with division of labour, including something as simple as a pencil[1] that you use to jot down notes?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

robert_tweed• 12 years ago

I may not know how to make a pencil, but I know precisely how a pencil works. I can be reasonably confident that it is not going to start writing in ink one day, because an upstream maintainer thought it would be a cool feature.

unwind• 12 years ago

But that "problem" has to be equally true in any field of engineering you can care to mention.

Nobody goes back to raw materials for all needs, it's simply impossible. There's no reason it should be less so in software.

Many car companies chose to build their own engines, but not all of them do. I'm pretty sure that among those who do, they still don't manufacture all of their own engine components, or even the bolts used to assemble the engine, or the wires used to hook up the engine electronics, and so on.

Sanddancer2• 12 years ago

I think this is the beginning of an interesting idea, however, the specific funding aspect seems like we could end up with the same dilemma, where people fund flashiness instead of the boring infrastructure projects. I'd rather see effort made for a sort of United Way for open source, where you give money, and their accountants audit projects, and give to groups based on need and value to the community.

Furthermore, I think this is a place where we need outreach to more than coders. This is a good start, but getting donations, and doing all the bookkeeping can be a pain if you're a non-profit. So having accountants willing to sit down with projects and getting things in order so they can set up as a non profit will make companies more willing to donate because they can write it off on their taxes; being a 501(c)3 from the beginning makes that process a lot easier.

walterbell5• 12 years ago

See https://sfconservancy.org

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

The model proposed by Snowdrift.coop is better fit to downstream projects really than to stuff like OpenSSL, although it touches on similar issues.

maerF0x0• 12 years ago

https://snowdrift.tilt.com/launch-snowdrift-coop/checkout/pa...

sesteel• 12 years ago

If anybody is interested in exploring anything like a 'gitcoin' please message me.

yournemesis• 12 years ago

tl;dr Arby's sells horrible roast-beef sandwiches

mwhite• 12 years ago

An alternative solution could be to innovate in licenses.

I think a lot of the problem is the idea that MIT/BSD-licensing is the ideal solution because it promotes freedom the most. Clearly, using restrictively licensed components under currently existing restrictive licenses often isn't practical for businesses, but that doesn't mean that having everything be MIT/BSD is the end stage in the evolution of open source licensing.

MIT/BSD-licensing promotes freedom for businesses, but hurts open source developers by requiring them to trust that they can be adequately compensated for their work by a reputation economy that's subordinate to a corporate system that we don't ultimately control.

What if the open source community adopted a norm of dual-licensing open source libraries with the choice of a restrictive non-commercial open source license (basically, AGPL with an added non-commercial restriction) or a license that permits commercial use if you pay?

The key would be that this dual-license would require that any derivative software also be licensed under the same dual-license.

Wouldn't that preserve freedom as in free, while ensuring that open source developers are compensated for their work at levels that ensure and incentivize an optimally robust open source software base?

The devil would be in the details but I bet there's a way to do this that preserves everything that's good about FOSS now and incentivizes better software.

walterbell5• 12 years ago

Has this been proven with CC non-commercial licenses, e.g does the non-commercial license function as lead generation for commercial sales?

http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/intro may be a software example, seems to be one developer.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

Non-commercial clauses mostly HURT adoption and cause incompatibility.

burntsushi• 12 years ago

I realease all of my open source work under copyfree licenses and I've never heen "hurt" by it. I don't have to trust anyone---I write code that solves problems of interest to me and I put it out there for others to use if they want to.

Adopting some complicated dual license sounds like a surefire way to stop people from using software I write, which runs contrary to my goal.

_delirium• 12 years ago

That's a fairly traditional approach for academic software: source made available but under a non-commercial/research-purposes style license, and a commercial license sold for commercial uses. It's been successful in some cases, mainly when active effort is made to sell the commercial product (e.g. through a spinoff company).

Just a standard GPL+commercial or AGPL+commercial dual-licensing route also works for some companies, without having to add on an explicit "non-commercial" restriction. Depends on the software and the market. MySQL made money doing that for years, for example. Qt also does something like that, although they further enhance the commercial version with closed-source features in the Enterprise tier (another common way of differentiating).

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

The mission of Snowdrift.coop, the site mentioned in the original article is to fund things specifically without relying on artificial restrictions like proprietary licensing.

drewcrawford• 12 years ago

Having spent some time on the problem I agree generally with your approach, but the problem is it doesn't appreciate the history and context in which the current system has arisen and continues to exist.

There are basically 3 cases of successful FOSS projects:

1. Ideologically-driven, e.g. Emacs, GNU, etc. These tend to have licenses in the copyleft family

2. Commercially-driven, e.g. WebKit, Docker, etc. These are projects that are strategically important to one or several companies. They tend to have licenses in the MIT/Apache family

3. "Lone Wolf" or "indie developer". While a lot of FOSS is this by volume, what you discover is that by the time projects become popular they have generally evolved into one of the first two types, although they often preserve their creation story as part of the marketing material

The problem with charging money for code is that it's really a bad deal for the first two types. The ideology camp doesn't want non-commercial licenses because it's a "restriction on a field of use" which they have a philosophical objection about that you can google. In the second camp, the corporate masters derive some kind of strategic advantage from having a popular open-source project and charging money necessarily means the project would be less popular and so of less strategic value.

What this necessarily means is that if there's any legs to this plan, positioning it as "open source" or to the "open source community" is exactly the wrong approach, because basically all the people who are successful in that community will find it a nonstarter. Instead you have to hypothesize that there's some completely different set of people that can benefit from this system, writing completely new software (or releasing pre-written software that isn't currently considered 'open source', e.g., proprietary software). So your positioning needs to be something like "proprietary 2.0" or even "third way" rather than being connected with open source.

The real problem with this system is that I'm not sure there's a market on the buying side. Developers are used to getting things for free, and even if somebody wrote a source-visible-but-pay-$1k-to-use-it high-quality TLS library I'm not convinced that people wouldn't just keep wrestling with OpenSSL because it's free.

I have a whole blog post I'm drafting on this topic, if anyone reading this comment is interested, give me a shout and I'll give you a preprint.

pdkl952• 12 years ago

This kind of situation where there is a common need for something, but there isn't a reasonable way to pay for it in individual transactions has a traditional solution: make the project publicly funded.

As an example, a military is a useful thing to have for protection, but paying for it as some sort of subscription or "per-invasion" billing is obviously not a realistic solution. So we fun it publicly, as a tax, which generally works[1]. Similarly, it might be useful to make a publicly-funded service that is charged with creating software infrastructure such as TLS or even libc that are difficult to fund directly.

There are a few advantages to using public funds: unlike traditional Free Software, as it uses public funds, the output would be public domain, and usable by anybody, commercial uses included. Also, as it doesn't have to worry about VC money drying up or "maximizing shareholder value", it would be easier to stick to a mandate that emphasizes quality instead of time-to-market.

On the other hand, problems with this idea would be the general concerns about corruption due to political meddling, and how to keep the NSA from pulling a BULLRUN on it like they did to NIST.

<speculation> Perhaps a "dept. of software infrastructure" could take over the "defense" side that the NSA seems to be neglecting recently. Moving all industry interaction (and trust) over to the new, open group so the NSA was known as spying-only might improve the relationship a bit... </speculation>

I'm not sure if this is a particularly good solution to the problem, but it's worth considering.

[1] Of course, there are details to argue over and bugs in the system to fix, just like any complicated project.

sokoloff• 12 years ago

Moreover, (far) fewer developers would base another complimentary project (open source or commercial) on that new $1K-to-use TLS library, because now their new project would be encumbered by a $1K hurdle that brought them neither revenue nor glory. So, they'd continue to wrestle OpenSSL in order to further the adoption of their own package.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 12 years ago

I thought the free market was supposed to be the most efficient allocation of resources.

forgottenpass2• 12 years ago

It all depends on how you define "efficient." Vague proclamations about the market like this often hold utility in narrow contexts, but abstracted as a general rule rely on circular reasoning.

tim_hutton• 12 years ago

The social benefits from free software are positive externalities and thus not naturally dealt with by the free market. Compare with the negative externalities of air pollution, for example.

WalterBright• 12 years ago

I'd get out and shovel simply because it's more interesting than sitting in the car, bored and getting cold.

Also, I contribute to open source because I intensely enjoy it - far more than writing software I was paid to write.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

Indeed, and everyone thanks you for it, but others enjoy freeriding. I think the actual game-theory is clearly simplistic. You could think of it more as being at home and having work to do rather than go shovel, so it costs you in other ways. It's not just shovel or be passive and wait.

codeshaman• 12 years ago

Most software that we write depends on one or more 'free' libraries that we embed into our projects (eg. express.js, libopenssl, CocoaLumberjack or jquery). Maybe your project is impossible without a certain library or maybe it saved you weeks or months of work. The fact is, we build on the work of others, who give it away for free. They make our ideas possible.

Concept: The people who developed the libraries are part of my team. Just like the people who contribute code to my project.

If we look at it that way, it becomes a lot easier to determine how OSS should be funded.

If my project gets a donation from a satisfied user or company, wouldn’t it be morally correct to ‘forward’ a slice of that to some of the libraries which make my project possible ? It wouldn’t just be morally correct, it would be a great satisfaction to be able to share the user’s generosity with them.

mwsherman• 12 years ago

Asking why popular software isn’t well funded is backwards. The question is, why is underfunded software popular?

Lots of under- and unfunded software is of poor quality and is ignored. Why is some of it (like OpenSSL) not ignored?

I don’t even think there is a market argument here, it’s much more pedestrian: a lot of people, based on social proof, use OpenSSL – which, short of becoming a crypto expert oneself, is entirely reasonable.

oofabz• 12 years ago

I don't believe we have failed. We have simply not yet succeeded. It's not like things used to be great, and then got screwed up. The tools and libraries we have now are so much better than they were ten years ago, and infinitely better than they were twenty years ago. We have been making steady progress and will continue to do so.

Sure, it could be going faster if someone threw more money at the problem. But right now there are thousands of top-tier developers working on tooling for the rest of us. Intel, Redhat, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and many others pay full time developers to work on important open source projects. Things are looking pretty good, we just need more time.

logn• 12 years ago

I don't think libre or open source is broken. I think some projects are broken. I think other projects are those people simply don't like, don't want to fund, and have to use because there are no other options. With some creativity and planning, open source projects can be self-sustaining, but they have about the same success rate as any other startup. The upside is that all progress doesn't evaporate when an open source project fails, it gets forked or consultants can transition people to new tools.

rumcajz2• 12 years ago

Not being paid is integral part of open source development. It keeps the incentives to produce quality, lean code straight.

forgottenpass2• 12 years ago

Open source isn't entirely a labor of love, there are people that do get paid for their open source development. Unless you're ready to back up your claim with analysis of contribution quality based on employment status I could just as easily point to different properties of the open-source model as the driving factor.

rumcajz2• 12 years ago

No, I don't have statistical data, but I've experienced both sides in person.

The crucial difference is sensitivity to ROI.

When not paid, every hour spent programming is an hour not spent with your family, not spent attending to your hobbies, not spent resting or sleeping. Thus you do your best to keep everything as lean as possible.

When being paid, keeping things lean is still a nice idea, but you don't care that much any more. After all, you are going to spend same amount of hours on the project whether you keep it lean or not.

Matrixik• 12 years ago

There is also gratipay.com (formerly Gittip)

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

Snowdrift.coop discusses Gratipay (which they say mostly supportive things) in their review of all the other crowdfunding sites https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/othercrowdfunding

lucozade• 12 years ago

To offer a contrary view:

I think the economics of software commons has been stunningly successful. It's substantially lowered the bar of entry for a large class of businesses and non-profit organisations.

It's great that people are experimenting with financial reward systems that are between free and fully commercial. The more the better as it's not at all obvious which ones will stick. I think it has the propensity to increase the number of people actively involved in this work.

Even better it may open up new types of activity e.g. independent open source software auditing.

But I don't feel that Heartbleed etc demonstrate a systemic failure in economics. The seismic shifting in attitudes to privacy/security that have happened over the last few years appear to be largely orthogonal to the funding models.

rectang• 12 years ago

I find it rewarding to volunteer at one of the big open source software foundations because the time I put in working on project governance, licensing, policy and so on ripples out through hundreds of projects and into the broader FOSS ecosystem. We're way better at what we do than we were even a few years ago, and one result is that there are far more people getting paid to work on FOSS.

Expertise on the administrative aspects of open source also makes me more valuable as an employee, because I can help my employer to consume and contribute to FOSS safely and efficiently. I recommend that anyone with the knack get involved.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

The software commons has succeeded for upstream / backend software for things that end up as user-subjugating proprietary downstream products. The economics are very poor in terms of providing freedom and openness to the best general-public software. In other words, today's business model still relies and obnoxious ads and artificial restrictions at the end of the day.

motters2• 12 years ago

A thought occurs to me that maybe public software could be funded by the public, via taxation. I don't think that would be any kind of panacea, because you can see what happens with other publicly funded things, but it's worth consideration - especially if public software is considered vital to the rest of the economy.

gargantian2• 12 years ago

Great idea in theory, but as you fear I think this would quickly be bastardized into more private military-industrial complex funding.

I would expect a tax-funded OpenSSL to be developed mostly in secret, in cooperation with the NSA, to be extremely expensive to develop/maintain, and to most definitely have backdoors.

motters2• 12 years ago

Yes, I think you're right. It is probably better for most public software to be independently produced, outside of the context of companies or governments.

Another way to tackle the problem might be to ensure that people who want to make public software have the time to do so, because that's usually the main limiting factor with any sort of volunteering.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

You could think of the proposal behind Snowdrift.coop as being the closest we could get to effect purely-voluntary taxation… Of course, if we had better real democracy to set better tax law, well…

holri• 12 years ago

If our society values sharing and condemn selfish behavior everything would be ok. But at the moment our neo liberalism capitalism values none cooperative egoists.

It is our ideas and virtues that have to change.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

One step at a time. Showing people that others also care is huge. It's easy when isolated to feel helpless. Big corporate multinationals are all connected and have strong business ties and networks and work to actively divide consumers so that we just choose what to buy when we go to the big box store or surf Amazon etc. That's why cooperatives are so important, and we need more of them on a large scale on the internet.

tim333• 12 years ago

Snowdrift.coop is an interesting idea but I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. If you consider his example of improving on open SSL I guess you'd get a bunch of companies saying we'll chip in say $10k as long as other companies do too. Then assuming that happens you'd have a money to pay some developers but that might not actually result in a better SSL. Just raising money does not necessarily produce good software.

In practice a lot of stuff seems to get funded by corporate sponsors or corporations just building stuff and making it open. Examples -

Rust - funded by Mozilla and perhaps the project most likely to lead to better SSL and similar?

Go, V8 etc - Google

OpenSSL - contributed to by Nokia, Huawei and others

Maybe Snowdrift can do better? Maybe not?

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

Ongoing donations helps with accountability. But otherwise, funding isn't a guarantee or anything. But if you look at where good software is, really good and robust, you don't find it from totally underfunded projects. Mozilla is way better funded than most other free/open software.

thmcmahon• 12 years ago

This is the same economic problem that affects basic research. Open source software is a 'public good' - its usefulness is not diminished when it is used by others, and you can't prevent others from using it.

The longstanding solution to this problem is government support. This might not be a sexy solution on HN, but it is the obvious one.

gargantian2• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, while government can mostly wrap its head around science though consultation with academia, the state of the art of software is so ethereal and moves so fast that I imagine seeking funding for software will be even more of a farce than it is in the sciences.

MrBuddyCasino2• 12 years ago

I agree it would make sense, but is the real problem not how to allocate that money?

Who decides how much the Postgres guys get, or if its worth to support yet another NoSQL store? Involving politics seems like a surefire way into mediocrity. How to get around that?

jmnicolas2• 12 years ago

Just by funding established projects.

In your example the new NoSQL store should prove itself before being funded.

edraferi6• 12 years ago

Maybe the government could provide the funding as a Tax Credit for donations to platforms like snowdrift.coop, just like donating to other non-profits works. Companies / Individuals would make their own decisions about what to support, and the government would foot the bill through them.

Obviously the government would create a class of acceptable organizations to donate too, rather than designating a single platform / portal. In this way it would be just like the new crowd equity system.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

and the site mentioned in the article, Snowdrift.coop, plans to support research as well. It's not a software-specific venture.

dllthomas9• 12 years ago

Incidentally, Snowdrift.coop is happy to have projects doing scientific research. The basic criteria are that 1) the project is producing some non-rival good, and 2) that good will be made freely available under an appropriate license (which basically boils down to the equivalent of one of CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA).

Government support works when you can get a majority of the people to agree they want something enough to pay for it. It works less well when the public good primarily serves the interest of a minority. In principle, even if government support was effectively tackling all the things it was appropriate for, there could be room for Snowdrift.coop in coordinating more niche things.

BenoitEssiambre• 12 years ago

This is cool. You can then phrase your plea for donations as something like: "Every 10 dollars you pledge makes others give us up to $100, your donation has 10x power!"

Also you could use with the fact that at the beginning of a campaign, your pledge doesn't have much multiplicative power but doesn't cost you much while at the end it costs you the full amount but you get huge multiplicative power.

snarfy• 12 years ago

It's a free software problem. Software would be funded if it was paid for.

quadrangle16• 12 years ago

Well, exactly. The entire issue only applies when talking about public goods. Proprietary software is not a public good.

easytiger• 12 years ago

I don't think I've ever read an opinion piece where I so completely disagree with every single point made or believed the author has completely inversely represented the reality he is trying to change. Interesting. Perhaps when I get home I shall expound on it.

vgrichina• 12 years ago

IMO the problem isn't that there are less resources dedicated to open source stuff than to commercial projects. The problem is that there is much less effort and especially polish dedicated to any not user facing aspescts of software. Internal libraries are almost certainly even more half-baked and full of shitty code than most open source projects.

The failed economics of our software commons and what to do about it

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